Summary
Summary
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK * Sadness is your superpower. In her new masterpiece, the author of the bestselling phenomenon Quiet explores the power of the bittersweet personality, revealing a misunderstood side of mental health and creativity while offering a roadmap to facing grief in order to live life to the fullest.
" Bittersweet grabs you by the heart and doesn't let go."--BRENÉ BROWN, author of Atlas of the Heart
"Susan Cain has described and validated my existence once again!"--GLENNON DOYLE, author of Untamed
"The perfect cure for toxic positivity."--ADAM GRANT, author of Think Again
LONGLISTED FOR THE PORCHLIGHT BUSINESS BOOK AWARD * ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Wall Street Journal, Mashable
Bittersweetness is a tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world. It recognizes that light and dark, birth and death--bitter and sweet--are forever paired.
If you've ever wondered why you like sad music . . .
If you find comfort or inspiration in a rainy day . . .
If you react intensely to music, art, nature, and beauty . . .
Then you probably identify with the bittersweet state of mind.
With Quiet, Susan Cain urged our society to cultivate space for the undervalued, indispensable introverts among us, thereby revealing an untapped power hidden in plain sight. Now she employs the same mix of research, storytelling, and memoir to explore why we experience sorrow and longing, and how embracing the bittersweetness at the heart of life is the true path to creativity, connection, and transcendence.
Cain shows how a bittersweet state of mind is the quiet force that helps us transcend our personal and collective pain, whether from a death or breakup, addiction or illness. If we don't acknowledge our own heartache, she says, we can end up inflicting it on others via abuse, domination, or neglect. But if we realize that all humans know--or will know--loss and suffering, we can turn toward one another.
At a time of profound discord and personal anxiety, Bittersweet brings us together in deep and unexpected ways.
*Includes a downloadable PDF containing a Bittersweet quiz from the book
Author Notes
Named one of the top ten influencers in the world by LinkedIn, Susan Cain is a renowned speaker and author of the award-winning books Quiet Power , Quiet Journal , and Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking . Translated into more than forty languages, Quiet has appeared on many best-of lists, spent more than seven years on the New York Times bestseller list, and was named the #1 best book of the year by Fast Company , which also named Cain one of its Most Creative People in Business. Her TED Talk on the power of introverts has been viewed over forty million times.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Business consultant Cain (Quiet) returns with an eye-opening take on the underestimated virtues of melancholy. She suggests that bittersweetness--"a tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world"--affords the opportunity to channel "pain into creativity, transcendence, and love," as exemplified by musicians and other artists. Cain handily traverses fields as diverse as neuroscience, popular music, religion, and business management to find instances of the transformation of pain and longing into fulfillment: the music of Leonard Cohen, for example, is "a transcendence delivery system," and in Michigan, a hospital billing department's culture of caring for distressed or bereaved employees resulted in collecting bills faster. Though Cain's panoramic scope covers some familiar ground (U.S. culture's "tyranny of positivity" has been critiqued before), this ambitious work impresses in its dexterous integration of disparate thought traditions into a cohesive, moving, and insightful whole. Like a more intuitive Malcolm Gladwell, Cain delivers a deeply felt study of the profound uses of sorrow and melancholy, a perfect manual for coping with tough times. Agent: Richard Pine, InkWell Management (Apr.)
Guardian Review
Now then, on a scale of 0 to 10: do you seek out beauty in your everyday life? Do you know what CS Lewis meant when he described joy as a "sharp, wonderful stab of longing"? Do you react intensely to music or art or nature? Are you moved by old photographs? Do you experience happiness and sadness simultaneously? If your answer is emphatically yes to these and similar questions in Susan Cain's Bittersweet Quiz (I came to a jarring halt at the one about being perceived as an "old soul"), then you will score highly and qualify as a "true connoisseur of the place where light and dark meet". You are not sanguine (robust, forward-leaning, ambitious, combat-ready, tough), but bittersweet - and to be bittersweet means to be sensitive, creative and spiritual, with a "tendency to states of longing, poignancy and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world". Bittersweet, writes Susan Cain with her startling sincerity, means the transformation of pain into "creativity, transcendence and love". In Quiet, Cain argued that we undervalue inward-looking, reflective, dreamy introverts in favour of the loud extrovert, who is gregarious, confident, bold, thick-skinned and successful. Bittersweet - a kind, optimistic and unflaggingly earnest book, not a fleck of humour on the horizon - is really a variation on the same theme and uses the same doubtful binary model. While the sanguine are the cheerful toughies in charge of the world, bittersweet is a neglected but truly beautiful quality. It's the compassion instinct, it's sadness, it's modesty, it's hidden suffering and quietness and the plangent allure of the happy-sad, the oh-so-aching sense of time passing. It's Leonard Cohen (Cain is ardent for Cohen, her troubadour of pessimism, which actually made me question my own love for him), Aristotle, sufism, Pippi Longstocking, Baudelaire, Nina Simone, the Qur'an and the Bible, Plato, Rumi, meditations, Maya Angelou¿ Like Quiet, Bittersweet is an easy-on-the-ego hybrid of genres. Cain turns to other people's stories as well as her own (her best and plainest writing is reserved for her own losses). She plaits these narratives together with research, philosophy, psychology, art and religion. Her statements about literature often made me blink (how does she know that Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet out of longing?). Gobbets of wisdom are scooped out of their necessary context and deployed to teach a crucial lesson: attend to the bittersweet; feeling the longing inside you. Because really this is a motivational book, sometimes like an expanded Ted Talk, each chapter drawing to a climax of kindness and connectivity with others, and often like a how-to manual designed to help the reader come closer to their vulnerable core: ask yourself what you're longing for, have a go at this online guided version of loving-kindness meditation and here are seven ways of coping with loss¿ There's something for everyone in this pick'n'mix feel-sad, feel-good assemblage. Cain wants a kinder, deeper, more connected and creative world. She has obviously thrown herself heart and soul into writing a book that will draw us together. But Bittersweet - much of which I cannot disagree with - did not uplift me. It depressed me and also made me feel grumpy. Its unflagging earnestness and sweetness of spirit flattens the terrain; everything feels like topsoil and nothing can grow deep roots. With her belief in the fundamental bittersweetness of us all, Cain seeks to erase differences between political groups, rich and poor (I don't understand why she turned to Princeton colleagues, industry leaders or the House of Beautiful Business for her examples or attended motivational workshops in Silicon Valley where privileged people could discover their secret wounds), between cultures and classes and religions. She also blithely fails to discriminate between the profound and the mawkish or charlatan: Romeo and Juliet sits cheek by jowl with The Bridges of Madison County, Freud with pop psychology. There are quotations from St Augustine or Charles Darwin and also platitudes such as "longing is the gateway to belonging" or "we are all reaching for the heavens". I'm all for the bittersweet - I love rainy days and sad songs too and drone Leonard Cohen songs on my bike - but after reading this book my longing was for the earth: for the salt of irony, for specificity, anger, doubt and laughter.
Kirkus Review
The author of Quiet turns her attention to sorrow and longing and how these emotions can be transformed into creativity and love. Cain uses the term bittersweet to refer to a state of melancholy and specifically addresses individuals who have "a tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world." With great compassion, she explores causes for these emotions by candidly chronicling her personal experiences and those of others throughout history who have suffered loss, including Plato, Charles Darwin, C.S. Lewis, Leonard Cohen, and Maya Angelou. "As Angelou's story suggests," she writes, "many people respond to loss by healing in others the wounds that they themselves have suf-fered." Cain argues persuasively that these emotions can be channeled into artistic pursuits such as music, writing, dancing, or cooking, and by tapping into them, we can transform "the way we parent, the way we lead, the way we love, and the way we die." If we don't transform our sorrows and longings of the past, she writes, we may inflict them on present relationships through abuse, domination, or neglect. Throughout, the author examines the concept of loss from various religious viewpoints, and she looks at the ways loss can affect individuals and how we can integrate it into our lives to our benefit. Cain contends that the romantic view of melancholy has "waxed and waned" over the years. Currently, a "tyranny of positivity" can often be found in the workplace, and the "social code" of keeping negative feelings hidden abounds. However, she points out the benefits that can come from opening up versus keeping everything inside. As a first step, she encourages us to examine our lives and ask ourselves what we are longing for, in a deep and meaningful way, and if we can turn that ache into a creative offering. A beautifully written tribute to underappreciated emotions. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In her first adult book since 2012's bestselling Quiet, Cain explores how a bittersweet perspective can help people overcome individual and collective pain, while encouraging compassion and unity. Cain defines a bittersweet outlook as "a tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow." It's a recognition that the light and the dark are inseparable; embracing the imperfections of the world goes hand-in-hand with a desire to make the world better. Cain utilizes an engaging blend of interviews, research, firsthand accounts, and biographical anecdotes to explore the many beneficial aspects of appreciating this mindset. Examples sprawl among many disciplines including the arts, religion, business, and family life. While melancholia was appreciated in the past, modern American society's emphasis on relentless positivity has led to numerous negative consequences, argues Cain. She explores the harmful effects of emotional suppression, including hostile work environments and generational trauma. Grief and loss are addressed, notably the death of Cain's father from COVID, and Cain posits that a bittersweet disposition helps prepare people to navigate and process life's difficulties. VERDICT Timely in its focus, this latest work by Cain delivers an eloquent and compelling case supporting the transformative possibilities of embracing sorrow. Highly recommended.--Anitra Gates